Leno at the Bat

A strikeout in NBC’s prime-time lineup.

Jay Leno does his best to keep the Peacock network afloat with his new not-so-late-night comedy show.

Illustration by Robert Risko

Two major show-business developments in the past half decade have inspired a combination of puzzlement, vexation, and dread, and both of them involved Jay Leno and NBC. The first was the announcement, in the fall of 2004, that in 2009 Conan O’Brien would take over Leno’s job as the host of the “Tonight Show,” and the second was the announcement, last winter, that this fall Leno would begin hosting a new show, at 10 P.M. five nights a week. Of course, part of the dread inspired by these announcements had to do with the knowledge that both would take up an inordinate amount of time and space in the news and in the chatosphere. The first round of self-referential on-air humor—with Leno and David Letterman both making bitter jokes about NBC, which had passed over Letterman in 1992, when Johnny Carson retired, and had now come close to pulling the rug out from under Leno—still seems like yesterday, and the second round, with Leno making needling jokes about being fired by NBC, actually was yesterday. Letterman is now making jokes about the 10 P.M. time slot, too, though it’s hard to tell whether he feels smug about his own fate or whether he’s insecure about not getting something he didn’t want anyway.

With its first decision, NBC was sacrificing a known, popular, and loyal star for a more eggheaded, quirky replacement, who stood a good chance of being denatured by the move from his 12:30 A.M. time slot. With the second, it was chipping away at its legacy of strong dramatic series and possibly overloading the night with yucks—all in order to save money. What’s mystifying is why Leno accepted NBC’s offer to do another nightly show. He did workhorse duty for the network for seventeen years, and it dissed him twice, publicly and at length. (It also, of course, paid him more than a hundred million dollars over the years.) He’s fifty-nine years old, tremendously wealthy, and still has a successful standup career—he does about a hundred and sixty gigs a year, a superhuman feat. And the move to 10 P.M. didn’t seem like a good idea to anyone, not even NBC, which clearly considered the new show not a creative move but a practical solution (it hoped, sweatily) to a problem, a plug for the drain down which network TV’s bathwater was swirling.

It would be nice, after all that, to have one’s expectations overturned by Leno’s new venture, which premièred on September 14th, and that could still happen. In terms of ratings, the show doesn’t have to do all that well in order for NBC to make money from it, but quality is another story. The forensic evidence so far indicates that a kind of death is taking place before our eyes; the only question is whether what we’re witnessing is an accident or a crime scene. Despite the fact that Leno is a showbiz veteran, and that he and his team have had nine months or so to prepare (granted, for five of those months he was still busy working at his old job), the new show is full of bugs, and Leno seems louder, antsier, and more ill at ease than you want in a five-nights-a-week companion. Leno’s job, as he has defined it, calls on him to be a showman, a presenter as much as a performer. The program has the format of a variety show, a creature that was virtually extinct decades ago, even before cable and the Internet. And there’s a halting, clanking quality to it so far; if the show had an intermission, you might exchange a look with your date that said, “Should we leave? Do you want to leave? Let’s leave.” Leno may be confused about what the show is supposed to be, and it probably doesn’t bring out the best in a person when his employer sends a message to the press that it expects to lose viewers and is just hoping not to lose too many. Networks put on bad shows every season, but, although we’re now aware that they sometimes know ahead of time that a show is a dud (Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC, has admitted this), NBC’s attitude toward “The Jay Leno Show” signals a whole new level of indifference, resignation, and laziness.

So what’s new about Leno’s show? Not the monologue: the first one had references to Cialis, Wilford Brimley, celebrity rehab, and Jay’s cars. Leno enters through a set of glass doors, which seems rather corporate. (The second week of the show, the doors provided a mild sight gag—Paul Reubens, in Pee-wee Herman persona, banging into them.) Leno stands on a thrust platform to deliver his monologue; the platform has an image on it that will be familiar to people over fifty—it’s a takeoff on the old black-and-white TV test-pattern designs. This one has the number “10” in the middle of it. Leno and NBC are really pushing the number ten—as in 10 P.M.—in an attempt to brand the hour as belonging to Leno. The number does double duty in the title of a regular segment, “Ten @ Ten,” even though the segment is never actually shown at that hour; it comes later. It’s a question-and-answer bit, wherein a celebrity on location somewhere is called up via satellite and asked ten questions that will supposedly elicit funny or edifying responses. Tom Cruise was asked if he had ever been to a strip club. (“No,” he said—and the audience booed, a reaction I don’t think I want to understand.) Amy Poehler was asked to name as many national parks as she could in fifteen seconds (because she stars in a show called “Parks and Recreation”). Mel Gibson was asked, I kid you not, “What is your favorite thing to eat for dinner?,” “Where do you keep your Academy Awards?,” and “Worst job you ever had?” Leno calls himself “a big-tent guy,” but this isn’t big-tent show business; this is the saddest of carnivals. It’s always fun to be at a live taping, and yet even the people in Leno’s studio audience don’t seem engaged—or perhaps no one has thought to try to engage them. Except at the beginning of each show, when Jay shakes hands with the people seated in front, we never see the audience. (When Letterman engages with the audience, he does so to great effect, as he did last week when he riffed on a woman in the audience who had brought along a heart-shaped potato; President Obama was the guest that night, and he asked to see the potato. The bit became an instant YouTube and Facebook hit.)

All the late-night hosts work the same vein of current events, and often they do it in the same way, so Leno can’t be criticized for the almost nightly mention of Kanye West his first week. Plus, it was a way to remind viewers (not that we had forgotten) that West happened to have appeared on Leno’s first night—right after he had upstaged Taylor Swift at an awards show. But you still have to get the jokes right. A few days later, Leno said that West was doing an album with Taylor Swift called “Ebony and Apology.” Shouldn’t it have been “Apology and Ivory”?

Speaking of ebony and ivory, though, when it comes to diversity Leno has the biggest tent of all the nighttime talk shows. Three of the regulars on the new show are black—D. L. Hughley, Dwayne Perkins, and a young comedian named Marina Franklin. (Larry Wilmore, a comedy writer and producer who talks about racial issues on Jon Stewart’s show, is referred to as the show’s “senior black correspondent”—the joke, and it’s a good one, being the implication that there is, or ever would be, more than one. Well, there are now, on Leno’s show.) Hughley went to Washington, D.C., to see if he could raise money for California—the sixty-eight dollars and change he made from a bake sale will be given to Governor Schwarzenegger the next time he’s on the show. Franklin, who is not as polished as Hughley, did a remote in Harlem that was unexpected, and unexpectedly funny—it touched on gentrification and, fascinatingly, the great divide between black hair and what white people know about black hair. It took place partly inside a black-owned salon, and it was a glimpse into a world that most of Leno’s audience isn’t familiar with. Even more pointedly, there’s a sardonic recurring bit in which Perkins singles out “Great White Moments in Black History,” such as the precise time that black people stopped saying, “You go, girl!”—it was after Ricki Lake started using it on her talk show. In other diversity news, Leno’s and the rest of the nighttime comedy shows are bizarrely lacking in women writers. Did a bomb go off and kill all the women comedy writers and leave the men standing? The other night on the Emmy Awards broadcast, the names of the nominees for best writing on a comedy or variety series were read, and, out of eighty-one people, only seven were women. Leno has no women writers on his show. Neither does David Letterman, and neither does Conan O’Brien. Come on.

Some of the remote segments of the Leno show—the ones that rely on celebrities appearing out of nowhere and adding famous-person fizz to the sketch—are well done, but more are excruciatingly long and labored. At the same time, there’s a rushed feeling to the proceedings. Leno spent barely one second thanking Bruce Hornsby and Eric Clapton after they performed, despite having said that getting them was “kind of a coup,” so that he could hit his nightly ten-minutes-to-the-hour mark—breaking for a promo for local news. While watching, you’re always to some extent aware of the show’s promotional nature, as you are with all such shows; and there is some overt humor on the subject—the stars who come on have to “earn” their plug by performing a task to Jay’s satisfaction. Leno means well here, but NBC is merely using him as spackle. The show serves a function; it just doesn’t serve any purpose. ♦